MN 17th August 2013
It’s all right – we haven’t lost the building or anything ghastly like that - but even on the penultimate day of the field project, the site’s archaeology is refusing to sit still and play nicely.
Our main missions today were to complete the bulldozing of trench 3, continue with the excavation of the features revealed within it, and start cleaning up ready for recording.
First off, though, it was a good time to get out the tape measure and confer with Eli Hargrove’s 1798 description of the building. This says that the changing room (presumably mirrored by the room with the plunge pool) measured 10 feet wide by 13 long. In yesterday’s Blogs I speculated that the south façade of the building might lie under the modern path; in fact, 13 feet from the rear wall of the building just lies north of the path. However, any evidence of the north wall’s presence is yet to show itself, while it’s not impossible that Hargrove might be as inaccurate as the maps have proved to be. Meanwhile, the ten foot room width should be easily accommodated within trench 3 - even though the east and west walls remains as evasive as the southern one.
The bulldozing and excavation work answered some questions, but asked more. First off we explored the masonry found near the second railing base which – with the eye of faith – looked a bit like a step. In fact, it proved not be, though still of some interest. It was clearly laid within a sequence of layers peppered with demolition rubble, and therefore post-dating the building’s destruction. The masonry was, though, carefully put in place. When lifted the main block proved to be a door step, a significant piece of stonework, and was laid on a row of other blocks of stone, including our fifth and largest fragment of marble. Altogether, this group of stones represents the overwhelming majority of the dressed stone we’ve seen on the site. The workmen obviously had some purpose in mind when they made this ad hoc structure – but what that was remains a mystery.
A bigger mystery then emerged as we realised that a larger part of the trench surface, along most of its western side, was a very large pit. This cut from the southern side of the wall foundation to the southern edge of the trench. The good news is that this explains why we saw deeper stratigraphy in the nearby trench 1, in July. The not so good news is that it’s function is very hard to explain in terms of what we think we know about the bathing house. It’s almost certainly much bigger in plan than the plunge pool, while – at about 2 feet - not nearly deep enough to be related to it.
Justin’s rather radical suggestion is that it might represent the site of the whole building, demolished and then its foundations – and the substrate between the foundations – dug out, lock, stock and barrel. If that’s the case then the surviving sections of the wall east of the pit would need to be from a retaining wall running in that direction from the building’s north-east corner, perhaps sheltering some form of yard.
I’m not entirely convinced by this. There’s what seems to be a lime mortar surface south of the wall, not entirely suitable for an outdoor yard. Moreover both the bricks of the wall foot and an additional brick structure to the south have been laid to create voids within the basal brickwork. The most likely purpose behind this would be to provide additional drainage to keep the downslope area to the south dry – a awful lot of trouble to go to for an external yard. It’s much more the sort of arrangement one would expect to damp-proof a building.
On the other hand the absence of any north-south walling at this stage is perplexing. For my money, I still think it likely that we’re seeing the floor of the east wing, but we may have lost the west wall of the wing to the post-demolition excavation of the large pit. Why the pit was dug remains a mystery, and one we’re not likely to solve in the course of the present excavation.
But there’s another day to go and who knows what we’ll find on this least predictable of archaeological projects.
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